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The whole idea of a luxury smartphone seems prima facie absurd, and in my happy, carefree years before encountering Vertu I sneered at it at every opportunity. Though high end electronics certainly exist, the rule of thumb for phones is to keep costs as low as possible through carrier subsidies, and in any case the shelf life of even the hottest handset is measured in months, not years or decades. (I still have my first smartphone --an ATT/HTC Tilt, from 2006, resistive touch screen and all. It has all the quaint charm of a butter-churn, and about as much relevance.) Luxury mobile handset, fiddlesticks, I thought. A gross excrescence on the whole world of pointless ostentation, suitable only for the sort of brutalist bajillionaire who gets into pissing contests with Roman Abromovitch over yacht length; the province of nouveau riche arrivistes, of monied hoi polloi and affluent barbaroi. While a high end stereo system is something that you don't expect to toss in a drawer and upgrade every couple of years, most of us happily re-up our carrier contracts when the time comes, in exchange for whatever is latest and shiniest in our preferred OS, and it is there --so I thought --that the real action was.

Vertu Constellation

And then I fell afoul of the vexing conundrum that is Vertu. A few basics: Vertu started life in 1998 and basically invented the luxury handset market. Other offerings have since made their way to the market, but Vertu is both the most recognized name in the game as well as the player to beat --even taking into consideration the serious problems parent company Nokia's had in coping with the senescence of the Symbian OS and the company's need to migrate to Windows Phone 8, Vertu has managed not only to stay the course as what at first seemed like a product destined to be laughed into non-existence, but actually to win hearts and minds, and flourish.

My own Road to Damascus moment with Vertu took place a few years ago when the company introduced its Signature S handset, which is still in production (and long may it wave) and is now, as it was then, the most expensive model Vertu offers. I was perfectly prepared to put double-barreled sarcasm to work and blast the whole idea of a luxury smartphone into glittering shards, but I found myself seduced almost against my will. The Signature S is one of those designs that seems impossible to improve on. It sits in the hand with cool, alien, almost sentient nonchalance --it's heavier than most cell phones but not uncomfortably so and its mass is merely an announcement of seriousness of intent. The phone looks gorgeous --if Lorenzo de' Medici were to have owned a cell phone it would probably have looked like the Signature S --but more importantly, it feels incredibly good. Picking it up for the first time sent shivers down my spine, as if I were some tabloid hack sent to do a scathing tell-all interview with Angelina Jolie and she'd suddenly slipped her hand into mine and fixed me with those tawny, mocking, heart-swallowing, ram-you-damn-you eyes.

Curses, I thought, now what am I supposed to do? Like a male praying mantis about to consummate its marriage, my every fiber of common sense screamed, no, don't, you idiot, she'll eat you (or at least the contents of your bank account) but suddenly, I didn't care.

Much has changed since then. The biggest new feature in the chaotically volcanic landscape of mobile handsets is of course the smartphone, with Android and iOS now defining the experience for hundreds of millions of users around the world. Nokia has been sorely tried --it's seen its smartphone market share drop like a falcon with a heart attack, and among the many changes wrought by the tsunami of Android and iOS devices is that the Finnish giant is in the process of divesting itself of Vertu, which is being acquired by private equity group EQT (get it? A private equity fund with a sense of humor; what were the odds) while Nokia struggles with wave after wave of layoffs, and the introduction of Windows Phone 8 to its ecosystem --having chosen to cease development of Symbian, its in-house smartphone OS. Perry Oosting, Vertu CEO, is unfazed by the switch-over; for one thing, Vertu is not only profitable but has shown robust growth (Nokia should have been so lucky; Vertu has been showing "double digit growth," according to Nokia, for the last several years running.)

The Signature S --that luscious piece of hand-candy that won my heart so thoroughly (and broke it; it currently retails --the base model, now --for $13,300 in the USA and I would gladly pay it if I had it for the pleasure of owning it instead of the grief of having had to give it back, but better to have loved and lost, etc. etc.) is an impossible object: a cell phone with a timeless design. Smartphones, however, are a different story, and it's with smartphones that Vertu has decided to assert itself most recently, with the touchscreen, Symbian-powered model known as the Vertu Constellation.

Both Vertu CEO Perry Oosting and Chief Designer Frank Nuovo (who restores classic cars in his spare time) have said that Vertu has more in common with luxury watches than with ordinary cell phones --they're hand assembled, craft objects (the phones are made, not in Finland or in some Foxconn-esque complex in the East, but in Church Crookham, Hampshire, England, which means right now it's a more English product than Burberry --not that Vertu's ever flourished its English home as part of its image) with a combination of design and a unique user experience, defined by everything from the carefully calibrated feel of the keypad to the efficient, gracious, and very useful Vertu Concierge Service. (I have used the Vertu Concierge Service to assist me in finding my way out of Geneva's Red Light District --yes, it has one --where I found myself after following the directions given to me by an editor with either a terrible memory or a morbid sense of humor; I was looking for what he'd told me was "the best falafel in Geneva." You can't make this stuff up.) The problem for Vertu in entering the smartphone lists is that so much of the user experience is defined by the OS, and here, the Constellation is challenged to take the aging Symbian system that is its legacy from Nokia, and transform its somewhat leaden character into gold.

The Constellation physically is everything you could wish for and classic Vertu --the attention to detail is extreme, from the V-shaped ceramic ear pillow to the hand stitched leather or exotic skins to the position and feel of the buttons. The speaker, camera, and flash ports on the back of the phone are placed in a line across a shield shaped plate that gives them the menacing appeal of a vintage Jaguar E-Type --trickle-down from Frank Nuovo's automotive hobby? Like the Signature, it's almost fetishistically sexy and the combination of warm, yielding surfaces and cool invulnerability give it an Ice Queen charm --it's the Grace Kelly of smartphones, right down to the pane of solid synthetic sapphire used for the touchscreen.